Bill Thies

Brief Bio

I am a senior researcher in
the Technologies
for Emerging Markets Group
at Microsoft
Research India. My research focuses on building appropriate
information and communication technologies that contribute to the
socio-economic development of low-income communities (ICT4D). This
work often encompasses human-computer interaction (HCI), online
education, mHealth, crowdsourcing, and other areas. Previously I
worked on programming languages and compilers, for multicore
processors as well as microfluidic chips. I received all of my degrees
from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I completed a
Ph.D. in computer science in 2009.

Recent Highlights

Most of my recent work has been in connection to three areas:

Mobile healthcare: We are championing 99DOTS, a new approach to monitoring medication adherence using mobile phones and innovative packaging. After pilots with about 100 tuberculosis patients in India, we are actively scaling up with the support of foundations, treatment programs, pharmaceutical companies, and the government. Some basic information is in our abstract for the Global mHealth Forum and this 1-minute video. More coming soon.

Interactive voice forums: Our voice portal for citizen news journalism, CGNet Swara, continues to have impact, which we describe in detail in an ICTD 2015 paper. A smart phone application for CGNet Swara was featured by Internet.org, and described in a DEV 2014 poster. An exciting experience with community moderation of voice forums is described in our CHI 2015 paper (best paper award). Recently I gave a talk on these projects at Cornell Tech and other venues.

Online education: We continue work on Massively Empowered Classroom (MEC), a MOOC-like platform that supports blended education in India. In a paper at Learning at Scale 2015, we described a small-scale randomized controlled trial that showed learning benefits in connection with MEC. We also described ongoing work on source effects and deterring cheating in online classes. At Learning at Scale 2014, we gave a broader talk on our work in education.